Examples of continuous chemical reactors, which have a continuous flow of materials or reactants into the reactor and a continuous flow of materials or products out of the reactor, are disclosed by WO 2004/089533, WO 03/082460, EP 1123735, and EP 0701474 B1. There are different features, which are important for flow modules, such as flexibility in set-up, flow configuration, mixing properties, temperature control, monitoring, residence times etc.
Therefore, a number of problems to overcome when designing and building multipurpose flow modules are for example, but are not limited to, leakage, enabling of visual inspection, cleaning of flow paths, adaptation of process flow path to get desired residence time for a given flow rate, access to process flow in the middle of the reactor, configuration of heat transfer flow, discharge of dissolved gas out of the module, mixing of fluids etc.
Thus, one object of the present invention is to provide a flexible concept of a multipurpose flow module, adaptive to a desired process.
Another object is to provide a multipurpose flow module, which has good accessibility and is easy to handle, etc.
A further object is to provide a multipurpose flow module having good heat transfer performance, and opportunity to control temperature.
A further object is to provide a multipurpose flow module having fluid flow characteristics suitable for chemical reactions, extractions, separations etc.